DIDO AU RAA, WIFE of Romulus au Raa and mother to his seven children, enters the warroom as if she has the intention of tearing it down from the inside. She stalks at the head of an armored column of cloaked Peerless Scarred dressed for war. Orange goggles cover their eyes. Dark ugan wrap around their faces. Unlike Romulus and his sons, they carry heavy weapons and wear battle masks and skipBoots. I see not a single Obsidian or Gray amongst them. This is a Gold affair. Cassius and I crouch together, momentarily forgotten. We search for some passage from the room, but there’s only one door.
“Hello, wife,” Romulus says from his pallet.
“Husband,” she says, voice muffled as she strides in front of her men toward Romulus’s smaller coterie. She wears a tan cloak, underneath which is dust-colored light karatan armor with radiation shielding and a hood. A kryll covers her face, orange reflective goggles cover her eyes, and around her head is wrapped a cloth ugan, like a Bedouin rover of Old Earth. A long black rifle is strapped to her back. She removes a new item every third step, till at last she pulls free the ugan, pulls back the hood, and a thick tangle of graying dark hair falls about her shoulders, framing a masculine, strident face with ridgelines for cheekbones. Gray-gold eyes flare out from behind thick rows of dark eyelashes and heavy, sleepy eyelids like those of her daughter. There is a duskiness about her, and a warmth to skin raised in Venusian seas, close to the bosom of the sun. “You said you were going hunting. But you didn’t say your quarry was gahja and errant daughters.” Dido clucks her tongue.
“Perhaps it should be duplicitous wives,” Romulus replies. He scans the soldiers behind her, eyes settling on a towering young Gold who bears a striking resemblance to Romulus himself. The man has an iron fist the size of a grapefruit embedded in the sternum of his armor. Doesn’t leave much of the man’s temperament to the imagination. “Bellerephon, you too?”
“You’ve held us at bay long enough, Uncle.” The young man’s voice is reptilian and amused. His eyebrows are thick as catepillars atop a dramatic face with a hooked nose. “Debts need repaying.”
Romulus looks back at his wife. “Is this really what we have come to?”
“It is where you have brought us. Now, where is my daughter?”
“In the upper reaches.” Romulus sighs. “You’ll find her scarred from her travels.”
Dido nods and motions to three eager young lancers. They depart at a run. She turns to her two sons. “Hello, children. I see your father has employed you in his schemes. Marius, I wish I could say I’m surprised, but you’ve always been a general offence to me. If ever a child deserved to be forgotten in the desert…But Diomedes, you disappoint me. Skulking about in the night on ill errands is the duty of an assassin, one of your father’s Krypteia, not an Olympic Knight.”
“Mother,” Diomedes says, nodding his head and dutifully receiving the kiss she puts on his brow, not knowing what to do. “Why are you here?”
“To voice my dissent.”
He eyes the men behind her. “And the men?”
“To ensure that dissent is heard,” Bellerephon says.
“I wasn’t talking to you, cousin,” Diomedes snaps. He steps toward his mother. “I know you and Father have had your differences, but this…this is beyond the pale. It is unforgiveable.”
“So many things are unforgiveable.” She shrugs. “I’m only visiting my husband. But why do I feel I’ve caught him with his hand on the water jug? Has he a paramour here? Come out, paramour!” She frowns. “No? None?” She makes a show of looking around. “None at all?”
“Are you quite done?” Romulus asks.
“Oh, Romulus, I’ve hardly just begun.” She fans out her cloak and folds her legs to sit across from him. Cassius waits with me in the shadows of the pillar, watching the door. There are too many Golds to escape.
“Wait,” I whisper to him. “Let them sort it out.” It pains him to sit and watch, but the new Golds are our only hope.
“Did you fire upon my escort vessel outside?” Romulus asks.
She shrugs innocently. “I remove obstacles from my path.”
“And my Krypteia?”
“Sorted.”
“You raise a hand against your Sovereign,” Marius hisses. “Have you both finally lost your wits?”
“No,” Dido sneers. “I have not lost my wits, you venomous, loathsome toad. You have lost yours, if you ever had any to begin with.”
“Mother—” Diomedes begins.
She holds up a single finger. “Mother is speaking.” She looks back to her husband as her large son lowers his head. “Did you think you could keep this a secret? From me? From the council? Shutter my bright child away and I would be none the wiser or worse about it?”
“Must we do this in public?”
“What have we to hide?” She smiles. “Do you know why she even went into the Gulf?”
“Because you sent her after your folly.”
This catches Dido off guard.
“You knew. But did not arrest me?”
“You are my wife,” he says as if that answers everything. I watch for some sign of affection to take hold of her. Even on Luna, their love was something of fable. Romulus and Dido, the star-crossed lovers who burned a city for their love. But the years, it seems, have dimmed their star. And now Dido pulls back away from Romulus, a look of disgust spreading across her face.
“Then you are a coward.”
“Perhaps. Are you more angry that I have faces you cannot see, or that I showed you mercy?” Romulus asks, amused.
“Where is the man I married?” she whispers. “The man who could carry a world on his shoulders? I look for him, but all I find is this withered, cowed creature you’ve become. If you were an Iron Gold, you would have sent me to the dust.”
Romulus sighs, unaffected. “All this Venusian prattle and bluster…You’re wading in the shallows, my dear. Shall we cross the Rubicon?” He looks past her to address the fifty Gold who’ve followed her into the room. More pack the hall outside. They watch from behind filtered reflective goggles, their cloaks making them look like devilish bats gathered in the shadows. “Children of the Dust, you stand before your Sovereign uninvited, wearing weapons and hiding your eyes like Horde filth. Remove them and kneel.”
They do not.
“I said kneel.”
Not a man moves. “There we have it,” Romulus says. “Alea iacta est.”
“You are a Sovereign, not a king, my love,” Dido says, her humor fled. “You have forgotten that, as did the old Luna bitch.” My blood stirs at the mention of my grandmother, even if her words are true enough. “Forgotten that you are expected to serve the will of the Moon Lords from Io to Titan. As you cloister yourself here, men loyal to the Rim seize control of Sungrave. They move against your Praetors in their ships, your Imperators in their barracks. By dawn, patriots will have control of Io, and I, as its Protector, will serve until such time that a new Sovereign can be elected.”
He smiles ruefully. “You may seize Io, but you cannot hold her. The people will not forget your birthright. A gahja till I made you my wife.”
“Don’t you start with me too….”
“The blood of my ancestors watered this moon. Their hands shaped her. She is ours and we are hers. You are not a Raa, no matter your brood. I make you a Raa.” He leans forward, baring his teeth. “Ganymede, Callisto, Europa, they will all fall upon you, and then Norvo and the rest of them will come and you will have spent your life and mine for nothing.”
“Perhaps.”
“Seraphina brought back nothing.”
“Is that a fact?” She stands to look down at him. A dozen of her men come forward. “Romulus au Raa, you are under arrest.” I wait for her to say the word “treason,” as does Romulus, but it never comes. “Bellerephon, seize him.”
Flanked by his men, Bellerephon steps forward. Diomedes’s hasta snaps up from his waist and forms into a two-meter-long lance. He points the long black length at his cousin. “Aevius, Bellerephon, as much as I love you, take another step and you will be for the worms.”
“Come now, cousin. Don’t be truculent,” Bellerephon says. But Diomedes does not relent.
“Son…” Dido says. “Your duty is to the Compact. Your father has violated it…”
“By protecting Seraphina?”
“For other sins.”
“You have evidence?”
“Forthcoming.”
“Insufficient.” He does not move.
She sighs. “Disarm Diomedes. Kill anyone who isn’t dragonblood.” Dido’s men hesitate, looking to Bellerephon for confidence. He nods them forward and they move as one toward Romulus and his defenders, their long razors held in two hands above their heads. Diomedes lifts his rigid razor to his lips. He closes his eyes and kisses the metal. Then his eyes open, and the spirit behind them bears no kindness.
When Diomedes moves, they begin to die.
He skims diagonally across the front rank of his mother’s men with such possession of his body that it seems he were another species entirely. One made of wind and wrath. He sidesteps two of their thrusts and removes the head of the one he called Aevius, and exchanges two parries with a thickset woman before pulling a second, shorter razor called a kitari from his belt, and skewering her stomach and ripping sideways through half her rib cage. Aevius’s body hits the stone and the woman stands there trying to stuff intestine and mesentery back into her abdomen before collapsing to her knees, bubbling screams from her mouth. Bellerephon and Diomedes crash together at the end of Diomedes’s assault. I watch in awe, and glance at Cassius. I thought he was the greatest Gold swordsman left. By the look on his face, I know now that presumption was shared and mutually shattered the moment Diomedes moved.
Sparks fly from the long razors of Diomedes and Bellerephon before they separate, both of far greater skill than the men around them. The other Golds encircle Diomedes, about to close on him from his flanks when his brother Marius lunges forward clumsily and sheathes his blade through the eye socket of a rangy Peerless. He’s slashed in the side of the head by Bellerephon. He reels back, like a child struck by a father, losing his right ear and very nearly his right eye. Flesh flaps open. Bellerephon kills two of the bodyguards as Diomedes takes one more of his lot. Vela is about to throw herself into the fray as Dido’s other men shoulder their rifles to gun the unarmored Raa down.
“Hold!” Dido shouts, stopping Bellerephon and Diomedes from cutting one another apart. Bellerephon draws back to her side, warily watching his cousin.
“No hand touches my father,” Diomedes growls as more Peerless encircle him. His eyes stay on Bellerephon, the most dangerous of the traitors. Marius and Vela tighten to make a hydra fighting formation, their spines pressed together as blood sheets down Marius’s neck. Clearly no warrior, he looks ridiculous amongst the rangy killers, like an overgrown glass figurine trying to dance with boulders. Despite their earlier friction, Diomedes angles himself to protect his younger brother.
Diomedes points his gore-covered weapon at his mother.
“You would kill your own mother?” Dido asks, stepping past her men toward him till the tip of his razor rests against her right breast. She leans into it. Blood wells through her tan armor. “Me. Who carried you in my womb. Me who nursed you on my flesh, on my milk.” She leans forward, centimeter by centimeter letting the blade enter into her body. “Me who pushed you into this world.”
“Enough,” Romulus says coldly. “You waste our blood. Let them take me. I have nothing to hide.”
Only when Romulus sets a hand on Diomedes’s shoulder does his son lower the blade. At her brother’s instruction, Vela lets her own weapon clatter to the ground. Once the rest of Romulus’s men are unarmed, Dido’s come forward warily and bind Romulus and his kin.
It ends as fast as it began. If this were a coup of the Core, Romulus and the rest of us would have been mowed down from the door. Fast and clean, with blame placed where it does further good—that is how my grandmother dealt with her rivals. It is how she told me I should deal with mine.
Seraphina enters with her mother’s men as her father is escorted out. Her eyes follow him with deep sadness. Dido bends by the dead Golds and tips a finger into each of their blood and spreads it on her Peerless scar as a Rim sign of respect. “See that they are sent to the dust with all honors,” she tells her lancer.
“Seraphina,” Dido says. The women embrace.
“Tell me you found it.”
“I did. You told me no one would be hurt.”
“Diomedes.” Her mother shrugs as if that explains it.
I stand up behind the pillar. Cassius joins me hesitantly. “Shall we try this again?” I ask.
He winces. “Let me guess. You want to talk. Go on. Use that silver tongue.”
“With pleasure.”
We step out together from our hiding place. The women turn to us. Their men rush forward with their razors. Cassius and I are knocked again to our knees.
“We get the gorydamn point,” Cassius mutters when one grabs his hair.
“The infamous gahja,” Dido says with a laugh. “Hiding like mice.”
I look at Seraphina. “We never had a proper chance at introductions. I am Castor au Janus. This is my brother, Regulus. Pleased to finally meet you. Now, considering I saved you from being a three-course Obsidian feast, would it be terribly rude of me to ask for a bath?”
“They saved my life,” Seraphina says in amusement.
“Saved your life?” Dido is annoyed. “I did not send you because you are a woman who needs saving. But still…My goodmen, I do not believe my husband showed you proper hospitality. Men of the Rim can be so blunt. Prithee, excuse him and let me amend the oversight.” She has her men unclasp the muzzles and opens a foil packet of wafers from a pocket on her armor and breaks a wafer in half to give to us. She pushes the pieces into our mouths, but we’re too dehydrated to swallow them down until her men push canteens to our cracked lips. “You are now my guests. And guests need not kneel.”